New fortunes for New Brighton

Sacred Mysteries: Christopher Howse welcomes a new role for a strange
church on the coast opposite Liverpool

In 1900, New Brighton boasted the tallest building in Britain, a tower 567ft high, in the image of Gustave Eiffel's. But the First World War saw its closure and in 1919 demolition began. By 1921 there was nothing left of it but the ballroom at ground level. Its last glory was a performance by the Beatles on June 14, 1963. In 1969 it was destroyed by fire.

The history of New Brighton Tower was emblematic of the whole resort, developed on the Wirral peninsula opposite Liverpool in emulation of the Prince Regent's Brighton. It throve in the age of the railway and steam ferry, then declined.

Its final, bitter legacy was Martin Parr's photographic essay from 1986, The Last Resort. His pictures showed tired and down–at-heel holidaymakers in stained cafés, a boy paddling his feet in water full of rubbish, a toddler scrabbling at a one-armed bandit.

So it seemed to some like history being repeated when in 2008 a gloriously eccentric piece of architecture was shut up and left to the danger of New life: vandalism. This was Sts Peter and Paul, New Brighton, a great domed structure completed in 1935 to the designs of E Bower Norris. Although based on the plan of the Gesu church in Rome, with a single nave focused on the high altar beyond the dome, the structure was of reinforced concrete with a brick exterior. Pevsner's architectural guide calls it "Modern by negative means", referring to the planing away of all internal mouldings.

Local people were very proud of this landmark to Mersey–bound mariners, but as the 20th century dwindled to its end, the costs of its upkeep rose and the congregations at the one early–morning Sunday Mass for which it was opened declined. In 2008 it was closed, and parishioners expected to go elsewhere.

Some joined a protest campaign to reopen it and even gained a judgment from authorities in Rome ruling the closure to be out of order. An architectural listing of the building as Grade II could not in itself preserve it from physical deterioration.

Then in 2010, a new and imaginative bishop was appointed to the diocese of Shrewsbury in which the church is situated. The Rt Rev Mark Davies was open to an approach from the Institute of Christ the King to take on the church for use not as an ordinary parish church but as a shrine. It would be a centre for devotion to the Eucharist.

The Institute of Christ the King is as strange as New Brighton, but in quite a different way. In appearance its members are distinctly Baroque. Priests wear lacey surplices and birettas on due occasion. They are much given to incense and dalmatics of Gothic cut.

You can't, or course, judge a priest by his chasuble. Renaissance men such as Charles Borromeo (1538–84) or Philip Neri (1515–95) lived lives of inspiring holiness yet cultivated a rich appreciation of the cultural expression of liturgy though music, art, ritual and architecture.

The Institute of Christ the King stands out as following the older Latin liturgy, last updated in 1962. This makes it suspect to some interpreters of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and welcome to some who value the traditional development of the liturgy. The latter, one can't help noticing, include the present Pope.

No house of the Institute of Christ the King had yet been set up in Britain, so its arrival at New Brighton has a historic element to it. Canon Olivier Meney has taken charge of the project. He was born in Versailles but has worked with some success in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is not at all like Versailles.

The ferry no longer plies across the Mersey to New Brighton, but there is still a railway station and trains run every quarter of an hour from Liverpool Lime Street. From New Brighton station the green copper dome of Sts Peter and Paul looms above the trees down Atherton Street to the south. And in future the church will be unlocked.